Distracted by Something New

Panel 1:
Chloe: Whatcha doin'?
Lisa: ’m writing an add-on for WoW. Sometimes real life gets in the way while raiding, and we don’t have time to type a message to let the party know we’ve been detained. My add-on solves that.

Panel 2:
Bink is about to land on Lisa's head.
Lisa: It uses a hacked kinect to register when the player has left or been distracted by something new coming into view. Then it sends a message to the raid party.

Panel 3:
Bink is on Lisa's head. She flails around. Chloe doesn't notice as she faces the other way.
Chloe: That seems helpful for people with young kids. But I don’t see how this will be useful in YOUR life.

Panel 4:
Lisa falls over. We see her feet fly up.
Chloe: It’s pretty selfless of you to make something you'll clearly never benefit from.

This would be very good for any gamer who has to stop to give out belly rubs to their kitties. My old cat used to wander up quite frequently when I was playing something, and would flop down on the floor and start calling out. Maybe if it could also pause whatever game you were playing too, that’d be cool.
It’d be even cooler if I still had a cat. I miss that little grey and white hairball. Excellent comic, I’ve just been reading the whole lot over the last week or so. Good work.

I would suggest to use sight direction (eye) tracking. If the eyes leave the screen for a preset time, then the user has gone afk/fell asleep. This can be done with a standard webcam too, with an open source face/eye position recognition library. (the direction of the eyes can be calculated from the offset of the centered position relative to the face of the user, trigger offset and time has to be calibrated to each face and webcam position) Btw: when i was living with 2 cats i just used a simple hotkey with a macro that could be pressed without looking

Sorry, but no this is not possible. WoW is executing code that it does not know to be secure; as such, Blizzard has it locked WAY THE HECK DOWN so that they can have at least some degree of confidence that their own legitimate clients are not trying to do things they wouldn’t want. The result is that WoW addons cannot access or interact with anything outside of WoW. Not via pipes, or APIs, or reading / writing raw text files or nothing. (Some addons get around this by putting data in the SavedVariables file, which is saved to disk when you log out, and then having a third party program that parses the SavedVariables file and sends it to a third party website or whatever) Long story short, WoW cannot get any data from a Kinect, hacked or not.

Alternatively, you could write a third-party program that does interact with the Kinect, and when it senses you wander away, makes sure that WoW is focused, and then emulates the keypresses needed to type out the message you want sent. This however is the technical definition of a bot, and the Warden would most likely detect it on your first run, and get your account banned. I don’t recommend it.

“This however is the technical definition of a bot, and the Warden would most likely detect it on your first run, and get your account banned. I don’t recommend it.”

Just run it on a different computer and insert the keystrokes into the ps2/usb keyboard stream. Some bots work that way and also include image recognition from the screen output. This is an alternative of having two intelligent cats or a neet* little girlfriend with two lazy cats. (* = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEET)